It’s not just the United States: Teacher shortages are on the rise among most of our international peers and driving schools to hire less-qualified educators.
Globally, nearly 40% of 15-year-olds attended schools in 2025 where principals said a shortage of teachers hamstrings instruction, up from 27% in 2018, according to new data released Tuesday in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s 2026 “Education at a Glance.”
From 2017-18 to 2024-25, the share of teachers in the classroom without full certification has risen in two-thirds of countries reporting data to the OECD. Nearly 1 in 10 primary and secondary teachers across OECD countries were not fully qualified as of 2025. (The United States did not report updated teacher data, but federal data show the share of overall uncertified U.S. teachers rose from 6.1% in 2015-16 to 6.9% in 2020-21, the most recent year available.)
“The real challenge, though, is whether our systems have enough teaching positions deployed in the right areas and filled by people with the right qualifications,” said OECD Secretary-General Mathias Corman, in a briefing on the compendium. He estimated schools will need 44 million more primary and secondary teachers by 2030, based on UNESCO data.
The lack of qualified teachers in science, technology, engineering, and math fields is partly to blame for this year’s historic declines in student performance on international tests, said Andreas Schleicher, the OECD director for education and skills, during the briefing.
“STEM qualifications are the backbone of our economies, our societies—and no STEM teachers means poor STEM education,” Schleicher said. “Attracting teachers in those kinds of fields will be crucial for the future STEM workforce.”
The OECD’s annual compendium, which highlights teacher-workforce problems this year, includes education data for preschool through higher education and workforce training in 38 member countries in Europe, Asia, and the Americas, as well as eight partner countries with more limited data, including Brazil, China, and South Africa.
While overall student enrollment has declined in 2025 in most countries compared to 2017, the last time this data point was collected, OECD found school staffing needs don’t necessarily align with student population trends—schools across the globe are hiring more teachers than in the past. In part, that’s because more students need specialized instruction, such as for special education or multilingual-learner support.
But countries continue to struggle to recruit and keep teachers in the highest-need roles, Schleicher said. In the United States, for example, many states have recently rolled back pay incentives for teachers in high-need subjects and schools.
The United States has been far more likely than other countries to recruit professionals from other industries to the classroom. Teachers who worked in a different profession for at least a decade before entering the profession make up 16.3% of the U.S. workforce, nearly double the OECD average of 8.4%.
How U.S. teachers’ workloads stack up against global peers
Teachers’ working conditions and professional identity can motivate turnover even more than salary, OECD found—though U.S. teachers tended to report higher morale than their global peers, even with larger workloads.
As of 2024, just under 40% of both U.S. middle school teachers and their OECD peers were satisfied with their salaries. However, more than 75% of U.S. middle school teachers approved of other “terms of employment,” such as hours, contracts, and job security, versus 68% for the OECD average.
“For motivation, what counts is, do you have an interesting career in front of you? Do you have a great team to walk in school? Do you have the right leadership? Do you have good relationships with students and parents?” Schleicher said. “Those things do matter more for teachers to determine the attractiveness of the profession” than salaries.
The OECD has called for countries to rethink how schools structure teachers’ time, which is often full of administrative paperwork and extracurricular duties on top of classroom instruction.
“We have to find more innovative ways to use space, time, and people, so that teachers can focus on what they do best,” Schleicher said.
U.S. teachers, in particular, tend to work both longer hours overall each week and dedicate more time to classroom instruction than the OECD average.
“Cultures vary a lot about this,” Schleicher said. “If you are in East Asia as a teacher, you are expected not just to be a great instructor, but also a good coach, a good mentor, a good social worker ... [and] address many of the social needs that students have—but you also get the time for it, and the work organization is such that you can actually do those kinds of tasks.”
In South Korea, Singapore, and Shanghai in China, for example, teachers are more likely to use technology-based tools to streamline administrative tasks and grading, but Schleicher cautioned that artificial intelligence is unlikely to make up for shortfalls in actual instruction.
“At the end of the day, teaching is a human social and relational experience, and that’s an area where AI doesn’t make a contribution yet,” he said.
